The author uses Ubuntu 6.06 (the
longer term supported version of Ubuntu at the time of writing). This
runs most of the simulators currently supported starting with ONTAP 7
and is probably one of the more usable Linux distributions..
If you need to run an earlier simulator - for example ONTAP 6.4 or 6.5, then use the old but still available RedHat 8.0. (pre-Fedora version).
Additionally any "modern" Linux that has similar major kernel and glibc
versions as either of the above recommendations should work fine for
the more recent versions of the simulator - e.g. the recent Fedora
linux and SUSE linux distributions
Using old Linux distributions may show up interesting
problems e.g. non-root users don't have ifconfig in their path so
you really have to run as root, sudo isn't suitable.
If you come across a modern mainstream Linux distribution that doesn't
work then please let the author know (paulhar@netapp.com).